Didion’s pieces for the magazine often describe people or institutions on the verge of transformation. In February of 2000, she wrote about the lifestyle guru Martha Stewart, who, at the time, was at the height of her popularity. In the piece, which was published four years before Stewart’s conviction for insider trading, Didion explores both Stewart’s appeal and the backlash against her. There is, she writes, a “proprietary intimacy” between Stewart and the public that circumnavigates traditional concepts of merchandising. Stewart is selling a product, but she is also selling a promise—the possibility of moving out of the perfect house and into the executive boardroom. Didion challenges those critics who sought to paint Stewart as a fortunate entrepreneur riding a wave of homemaking nostalgia.

The message Martha is actually sending, the reason large numbers of American women count watching her a comforting and obscurely inspirational experience, seems not very well understood. There has been a flurry of academic work done on the cultural meaning of her success…but there remains, both in the bond she makes and in the outrage she provokes, something unaddressed, something pitched, like a dog whistle, too high for traditional textual analysis. The outrage, which reaches sometimes startling levels, centers on the misconception that she has somehow tricked her admirers into not noticing the ambition that brought her to their attention.

Stewart pushes people’s buttons, Didion writes, because, all too often, ambition and domesticity are perceived to be at odds with each other. The significance of Stewart’s story is that it reveals and highlights the “sheer nerve” of someone who was able to leverage her skills in a traditionally undervalued field—homemaking—into a billion-dollar empire. Ultimately, Didion concludes, the fears and inspiration into which Stewart taps are not those of domesticity but of female power.

The whole piece is available in our archive. If you’d like to read more from Didion, please check out her 1998 piece, “Last Words,” on the life of Ernest Hemingway.

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